Biblion Bible Commentary
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Elihu: He Delivers the Afflicted by Affliction
Job 36:1-33
1 Elihu also continued, and said, · WEB
Elihu's best sentence is that God rescues people by means of the trouble itself, and his worst is the claim to perfect knowledge.
The speech opens with a claim that should be weighed carefully: one who is perfect in knowledge is with you Job 36:4.
If he means himself, it is the most arrogant line in the book. If he means God, it is the plain truth — and the whirlwind speech will shortly ask who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Job 38:2, which is the phrase Elihu has just used of somebody in the room.
His argument this time is about the purpose of affliction, and it is the best account of it in the poem. Men bound in fetters and taken in the cords of afflictions are not being paid out; they are being shown something. God shows them their work, and opens their ears to instruction, and commands that they return Job 36:8–10.
The trouble is a summons, and it is not the final word. The outcome depends on the response: those who listen will spend their days in prosperity, and those who do not will die without knowledge Job 36:11–12.
Then the sentence the chapter exists for, and it is one of the finest in Scripture. He delivers the afflicted by their affliction, and opens their ear in oppression Job 36:15.
Not from the affliction — by it. The suffering is the instrument of the rescue rather than the obstacle to it, and the hearing happens inside the pressure rather than after it lifts. Every other speaker has treated suffering as a bill to be explained. Elihu treats it as a means, and he is closer to the truth of chapters 1 and 2 than anyone else gets.
The limits of it should also be said. Elihu still assumes there is something in Job to be corrected, and God has already stated that the ruin had no cause in him Job 2:3. The mechanism is right and the diagnosis is wrong.
One verse admits more than the friends ever did: God is great, and we don't know him. The number of his years is unsearchable Job 36:26.
And then the speech turns to weather, and stays there. God draws up the drops of water, which distill in rain from his vapor Job 36:27 — an accurate description of evaporation and rainfall, given as an example of something ordinary and beyond understanding.
The clouds spread, the thunder rolls, the lightning is commanded to strike the mark Job 36:29 Job 36:32. By these things he judges the people. He gives food in abundance Job 36:31 — the same storm ruins and feeds, and Elihu will not separate the two.
The last line notices that the animals know it is coming Job 36:33. A storm is building over the conversation while he speaks, and the next voice out of it is not his.
settled What this mark means